Witness

Currently re-reading Whittaker Chambers’ Witness. One of Chambers’ quotes from the 1960s, as provided by William F Buckley in 2001, seems rather prescient half a century later :

But if the Republican Party cannot get some grip of the actual world we live in and from it generalize and actively promote a program that means something to the masses of people—why somebody else will. Then there will be nothing to argue. The voters will simply vote Republicans into singularity. The Republican Party will become like one of those dark little shops which apparently never sell anything.

As we have seen in California, if you aren’t providing a solution, if all you have to offer is rote opposition, you’ve got nothing to sell. And people will leave.